Abolitionist v. Feminist: Historic Context
Sojourner Truth represents the very best of both the Abolitionist and Feminist movements. Nonetheless, Truth is primarily associated with the former. In her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, Truth distinguished the differences between the concerns of white women and those of black women.
In addition to agitating against the prejudice of white men who thought that white women should not “overexert” themselves mentally, white women were also concerned with dispelling the qualms of white men who thought that the “fairer sex”—a term that applied exclusively to white women—should not overexert itself physically. During that time, however, the notion that black women might overexert themselves physically would have been laughable to white society. As Truth remarked, “”Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”
Then as now, black women have had the unique experience of being both stripped of our sex and sexuality even as we are either sexually exoticized or sexually denigrated by white society. Sadly, as I will show, this is not a problem that has disappeared with the abolition of slavery.
White women in the 1800s were certainly treated as second class citizens by their white male counterparts. On the other hand, in status, white women occupied a position that was far superior to that of most people of color and certainly to that of black people. In some parts of the United States, a black man could be lynched for “looking too long” at a white woman no matter her socioeconomic standing. The tragic story of fourteen year-old Emmett Till is perhaps the most noted example of a southern white lynch mob mentality which persisted even in 1955. In at least one incident that same year, a black girl was “beaten for ‘crowding’ a white woman in a local store” in Mississippi. As I argue later, because they were forbidden fruit to all but white men, white women became a nearly universal male status symbol.
Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Bradley, circa 1955.
Third or fourth class citizen, however, does not even begin to describe the lives of most black women under slavery. In general, blacks were perceived by whites as subhuman. In fact, white people often treated their dogs and other domesticated animals better than they treated black people. In general and in that time period, whites’ treatment of their pets could often be characterized as indulgent while their treatment of black people could more aptly be characterized as barbaric, irrational and inherently counterproductive. Ironically, then as now, the most vocal racists have often ascribed these latter traits to black people.
Sojourner Truth gives us a glimpse of some of the horrors experienced by black women during slavery.
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns…and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me…
Under slavery, black women were both a source of profit and of distress to their white mistresses. Since the slave system depended on cheap labor, black women were often viewed by white slaveowners as breeding machines. It is in this context that many white masters justified their rapes of the black women in their power. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs recounted her experience as the unwilling object of her master’s “affections” and her mistress’ wrath:
Mrs. Flint possessed the key to her husband’s character before I was born. She might have used this knowledge to counsel and to screen the young and the innocent among her slaves; but for them she had no sympathy. They were the objects of her constant suspicion and malevolence. She watched her husband with unceasing vigilance; but he was well practised in means to evade it. What he could not find opportunity to say in words he manifested in signs.
While most women today show sympathy and “sisterhood” for women who have undergone the traumatic experience of rape, white women rarely showed this kind of concern for black women during slavery. A white mistress was more likely to view a black woman who was the repeated victim of her husband’s lechery as “competition” than as a “sister” in need of solidarity and compassion. Though the concept of competition presumes a certain level of equality or agency that did not actually exist for black women—that is, absurd though this may seem—this was, nonetheless, the manner in which most white mistresses appear to have regarded their black female slaves.
Jacobs wrote:
She was not a very refined woman, and had not much control over her passions. I was an object of her jealousy, and, consequently, of her hatred; and I knew I could not expect kindness or confidence from her under the circumstances in which I was placed. I could not blame her. Slaveholders’ wives feel as other women would under similar circumstances…
…she spent many a sleepless night to watch over me. Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she startled me, on such occasions, she would glide stealthily away; and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my sleep, and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful for my life. It had been often threatened…
White mens’ rape of black women highlights the contradictions and falsehoods of white supremacy. Again, Jacobs noted:
The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences.
The full text of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is available online. You can find it here.
In the next section, I’ll place the womanist and feminist split in the modern context. Please stay tuned!
Below are links to previous installments of “Chasms of Isms.”
